With continuous development of technologies, such as mobile communication, computer processing and so on, terminal devices are becoming more and more intelligent as required by users. The term “intelligent” used herein means that terminal devices are used to not only place phone calls, but also web-surf, navigation, TV, music, etc. To achieve these functionalities, an intelligent terminal device usually has a lot of function modules, such as, a WIFI (Wireless Fidelity) module, a GPS (Global Positioning System) module, a CMMB (China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting) module, or the like.
On the other hand, by receiving operations of key pressing or operations, such as sliding or clicking on a touch screen, from a user, a terminal device usually may receive inputs from the user and implement corresponding instructions. When the terminal device is temporarily not used by the user, it may enter into a locked state (automatically or manually controlled by user operations). At this time, unless it is unlocked with special operations of the user (pressing a specified key combination or performing some specified sliding operations), or it is used for calling emergency numbers, the terminal device will not respond to any other input from the user. In this way, some troubles, such as undesired power consumption or placing a wrong call, due to a keyboard or screen being touched accidently (for example, touched by some other things when placed in a bag) may be prevented.
However, in prior art, if the user wants to use a certain function of the terminal device when the terminal device is in the locked state, the user performs a series of troublesome operations. For example, an unlocking operation or a screen wake-up operation is first required to be performed, a desired function module is found in a corresponding directory, an enable option is selected from options, and then a corresponding interface is shown, and so forth. For another example, with respect to an electronic device with a touch screen, a typical scenario will be: activating the screen→sliding to unlock→turning over pages to find an application or service→clicking to launch the corresponding application or service. With the substantial increase of the number of applications or services and augment of the storage capacities of electronic devices, it will be increasingly difficult for the above operations. As a result, the “intelligence” of an intelligent cell-phone is greatly reduced.